'Penetrating, intensely personal, and impossible to put down, this is a book you need to read.' Annie Proulx, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

'This book is a triumph.' Bill McKibben

A riveting, revelatory account of how the climate emergency is changing us from the inside out

It is now inarguable that climate change threatens the future of life on Earth. But in The Weight of Nature, award-winning journalist and neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern shows that the warming climate is not just affecting our planet – it is affecting our brains and bodies too.

Drawing on seven years of ground-breaking research, Aldern documents a burgeoning public health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Eco-anxiety, he shows us, is just the tip of the iceberg. The rapidly changing environment is directly intervening in our brain health, behaviour, decision-making and cognition in real time, affecting everything from spikes in aggravated assault to lower levels of productivity and concentration, to the global dementia epidemic. Travelling the world to meet the scientists and doctors unravelling the tangled connections between us and our environment, and reporting the stories of those who are already feeling these shifts most keenly, Aldern shows how climate change isn’t just around us, but within us.

Lucid, urgent and at times deeply moving, The Weight of Nature is a revelation, bringing to light the myriad ways in which the natural world tugs and prods at the decisions you make; how it twists and folds your memories and mental states; how this nebulous everywhere we call the environment is changing our very humanity from the inside out.

"Elegant, convincingly argued … a calm voice in a world of chaos … impossible to ignore" - New Statesman

"A neuroscientist shows the myriad ways that our warming climate is making us cranky, dopey and sick… Aldern has managed to do something that most books about climate change fail to: cast the problem in a new light, revealing it to be more insidious than it first appeared" - The Times

"In The Weight of Nature, Clayton Page Aldern comes closer than anyone in a long time to articulating why so many of us feel queasy about climate change: it is altering the landscape but also us... Beautifully written, this heatwave reading will give you the chills" - Financial Times

"Arresting revelations ... this is not another book about climate anxiety" - Financial Times

"Aldern is an excellent storyteller, drawing on interviews and personal experience, with an elegant prose style… and his background in neuroscience puts him on a strong footing to explore the mechanistic impacts of climate change on brain function and chemistry" - TLS

"Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us" - The New York Times, Book Review

"Urgently necessary… A lyrical and scientifically rigorous account of the emotional and physical toll climate change is taking on the human brain" - Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

"Gripping... completely blew my mind" - Heatmap

"Compelling.. unexpected and nuanced" - British Journal of Psychiatry

"While we are so often attuned to an individualistic separateness of self, The Weight of Nature offers a new way of understanding our relationship with the Earth through a grounded notion of planetary empathy" - Resurgence Magazine